Gaia Hypothesis

[studiot]

14 hours ago, sethoflagos said:

You've got me thinking now! 

 

13 hours ago, joigus said:

It's kind of like trying to define the pressure of a collectivity of two molecules!

Nice side issue.

 

When watching nature programmes, (Attenborough, Countryfile and others ) they often highlight a particular bird, creature, insect or plant which can only feed and /or breed in a certain place or on certain foods.
It seems to me that such specialists are more often than not on the endangered species list in our world.

[dimreepr]

4 hours ago, studiot said:

 

Nice side issue.

 

When watching nature programmes, (Attenborough, Countryfile and others ) they often highlight a particular bird, creature, insect or plant which can only feed and /or breed in a certain place or on certain foods.
It seems to me that such specialists are more often than not on the endangered species list in our world.

Indeed, but I bet we pay way more to kill some of the rats, than we do to save all the endangered species; then there's the cockroach and all his/her buddies...

Edited July 26 by dimreepr

[Luc Turpin]

An interesting read; especially for those who find the notion romantic, but without scientific sustenance.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/24/magazine/earth-geomicrobiology-microbes.html

 

[CharonY]

I skimmed the article when it came out and I remember that I was mildly annoyed by the fact that (IMO) authors mixed up assumptions with technical limitations of the time to sell how big the discovery ares. Many microbiologists assumed biological activity in deep soil (or deep seas for that matter), but some key abilities (such as dissimilatory iron reduction) were not understood yet and laboratory techniques to investigate the bacteria were missing. 

I may misremember, but it felt like that the author deliberately tried to conjure a veil of mystique over something that simply required hard work to fully understand and which was much less baffling once it was (as usual). 

[Luc Turpin]

A few excerpts

"In recent decades, however, the sci­entific understanding of life’s relationship to the planet has been un­dergoing a major reformation. Contrary to longstanding maxims, life has been a formidable geological force throughout Earth’s history, often matching or surpassing the power of glaciers, earthquakes and volcanoes. Over the past several billion years, all manner of life forms, from microbes to mammoths, have trans­formed the continents, ocean and atmosphere, turning a lump of or­biting rock into the world as we’ve known it. Living creatures are not simply products of inexorable evolutionary processes in their particu­lar habitats; they are orchestrators of their environments and partici­pants in their own evolution. We and other living creatures are more than inhabitants of Earth. We are Earth: an outgrowth of its physical structure and an engine of its global cycles. The evidence for this new paradigm is all around us, although much of it has been discovered only recently and has yet to permeate public consciousness to the same degree as, say, selfish genes or the microbiome."

"Yet there has never been an objective measure or a universally accepted definition of life. There are numerous examples of things we con­sider inanimate that have traits of the living and vice versa. Life is more spectral than categorical, more verb than noun. Life is not a distinct class of matter but rather a process — a performance. Life is something matter does."

"Although sci­ence has not yet arrived at a fundamental explanation of the phenomenon we call life, many experts in the past century have favored a variation of the following: Life is a system that sustains itself. This defining capacity for active self-preservation and self-regulation emerges at many different scales: at the scale of the cell, the organism, the ecosystem and, I would argue, the planet."

"Gaia still retains something of a stigma in mainstream science, but in recent decades opposition has waned significantly. Although the claim that Earth itself is a living entity remains contro­versial, some scientists embrace it, and others are increasingly open to it. The idea that life transforms the planet and is intertwined with its self-regulatory processes has become a central tenet of mainstream Earth-system science, a relatively young field that explicitly studies the living and nonliving components of the planet as an integrated whole. As the Earth-system scientist Tim Lenton has written, he and his colleagues “now think in terms of the coupled evolution of life and the planet, recognizing that the evolution of life has shaped the planet, changes in the planetary environment have shaped life, and together they can be viewed as one process.”

"One early metaphor Lovelock deployed to explain Gaia was a redwood tree. Only a few parts of a tree contain living cells, namely the leaves and thin layers of tissue within the trunk, branches and roots. The rest is dead wood. Similarly, the bulk of our planet is inanimate rock, wrapped in a flowering skin of life. Just as strips of living tissue are essential to keep a whole tree alive, Earth’s living skin helps sustain a kind of global being. What Lovelock did not realize at the time, however, was that even Earth’s seemingly inert skeleton of rock was far more porous and alive than most people believed."

"To recognize that deep subsurface life not only exists but also is engaged in a continuous alchemy of earth — that it may have helped create the very land on which all terrestrial life depends — is to redefine the modern understanding of life’s influence on the planet. Yet even today, some scientists, especially in geology and related fields, continue to describe life as a relatively inconsequential layer of goo coating a vastly greater mass of inanimate rock."

"There’s simply no comparison between an Earth without life and Earth as we know it. Life’s ubiquity endows our planet with an anatomy and physiology. Together, Earth and life form a single, self-regulating system, one that has endured and evolved for more than four billion years. We have as much reason to regard our planet as a living entity as we do ourselves: a truth no longer substantiated by intuition alone, or by one man’s vi­sion, but by a preponderance of scientific evidence."

"For more than two centuries, Western science has re­garded the origin of life as something that happened on or in Earth, as if the planet were simply the setting for a singular phenomenon, the manger that housed a miracle. But the two cannot be separated in this way. Life does not merely reside on the planet; it is an extension of the planet. Life emerged from, is made of and returns to Earth. Earth is not simply a terrestrial planet with a bit of life on its surface; it’s a planet that came to life. Earth is a rock that broiled, gushed and bloomed: the flowering callus of a half-sealed Vesuvius suspended in a bubble of breath. Earth is a stone that eats starlight and radiates song, whirling through the inscrutable emptiness of space — pulsing, breathing, evolving — and just as vulnerable to death as we are."

 

[Luc Turpin]

We raise the possibility that there are no hard steps (despite the appearance of major evolutionary singularities in the universal tree of life), and that the broad pace of evolution on Earth is set by global environmental processes operating on geologic timescales (i.e., billions of years). Put differently, humans originated so 'late' in Earth's history because the 'window of human habitability' has only opened relatively recently in Earth history." Mills et all

Sure sounds like Gaia!

Mills said the notion of hard steps has left an imprint on humanity that is not justified. "Many people have taken these conclusions for granted, as if science has actually proven that our existence on Earth depended on chance events with small likelihoods in the available time," he said."Not only are these conclusions unjustified, they are damaging to our collective self-image, contributing to the notion that humans are an accident of Earth's biosphere rather than a natural expression of it."He believes this idea has handicapped human life and is steering us in the wrong direction"

Sure sounds as if science overstepped its boundaries once again

https://phys.org/news/2024-09-hard-evolutionary-history-human-intelligence.html

https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10293

 

[swansont]

2 hours ago, Luc Turpin said:

Sure sounds like Gaia!

Not to me.

2 hours ago, Luc Turpin said:

Mills said the notion of hard steps has left an imprint on humanity that is not justified. "Many people have taken these conclusions for granted, as if science has actually proven that our existence on Earth depended on chance events with small likelihoods in the available time," he said."Not only are these conclusions unjustified, they are damaging to our collective self-image, contributing to the notion that humans are an accident of Earth's biosphere rather than a natural expression of it."He believes this idea has handicapped human life and is steering us in the wrong direction"

Sure sounds as if science overstepped its boundaries once again

I’m baffled as to how you come to this characterization. You’re also entirely too credulous when it comes to untested/unconfirmed ideas. A proposal of a new idea does not mean an existing idea is wrong. Did you miss the part that said “The paper has been released on the preprint server arXiv and has been submitted to a journal”? It’s not even gone through peer review, yet, much less been independently tested (though I’m not sure how you test such ideas)

[Luc Turpin]

46 minutes ago, swansont said:

I’m baffled as to how you come to this characterization. 

The creation of hard steps thrust upon society as if they were hard facts when they are actually interpretation of facts, that is my characterization. This is my main message here and shared by the author of the study.

[Luc Turpin]

11 hours ago, swansont said:

Not to me.

Who is participant in global environmental processes operating on geologic timescales according to the New York Times article?

11 hours ago, swansont said:

You’re also entirely too credulous when it comes to untested/unconfirmed ideas. A proposal of a new idea does not mean an existing idea is wrong. Did you miss the part that said “The paper has been released on the preprint server arXiv and has been submitted to a journal”? It’s not even gone through peer review, yet, much less been independently tested (though I’m not sure how you test such ideas)

The rest of the post is avoidance of my own main contention or characterization. 

[swansont]

10 hours ago, Luc Turpin said:

The creation of hard steps thrust upon society as if they were hard facts when they are actually interpretation of facts, that is my characterization. This is my main message here and shared by the author of the study.

Thrust upon society? There isn’t any sort of hypothesis police that forces people to accept such models. Your view of how science works doesn’t match reality.

[Luc Turpin]

29 minutes ago, swansont said:

Thrust upon society? There isn’t any sort of hypothesis police that forces people to accept such models. Your view of how science works doesn’t match reality.

No police required. Science's social status and repetition suffices. Your view of science as it is is better than mine. My view of what science should be might be better than yours.

[Luc Turpin]

Life changes the environment and the environment affects life

Its an intricate choreography with multiple dancers, not a monologue.

"Circadian disruption, gut microbiome changes linked to colorectal cancer progression"

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-09-circadian-disruption-gut-microbiome-linked.html#google_vignette